by David Hakala

I bought a Thinkpad T61 notebook recently, retiring a vintage 2001Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop. (Go ahead and snigger, but we made lots of money together.) The new machine, like most others made in recent years, has a small touch-sensitive cursor-moving pad in the center of its front edge – right where I like to rest the balls of my thumbs when I am typing. As a result, the cursor sometimes jumped around unexpectedly and the characters I was typing ended up in the middle of previously written words.

I learned this nuisance is called a touchpad. It is useless, too small to give me good control of the cursor. I use a USB mouse with a self-retracting cord. The touchpad had to go.
Click to continue reading…